ABOUT THIS ALBUM

Album Notes

This two-track (just under 50 mins) opus offers visionary electronic musician, Michael Peck at his darkest and most minimal.
Monolithic walls of crawling guitar, theremin and recycled audio construct a slugtrail of pummeling atmospheres that close in you, cornering you with blatant uneasyness and forlorn abandon. A realm where light simply does not reach.

M.Peck (also known as Michael Peck and Redfadesbeforeblue) is a composer of electronic and dark ambient soundscapes. He’s been recording music with digital synthesizer, software applications and Theremin since 2000. Already known to the electronic scene as a maestro of ominous dark ambient, he brings us Dysmha.

“Deathbed Memory” is a texture of ambient sounds woven with Theremins, guitar effects, cymbals and some truly ghost-like vocals. It has what can best be described as a monumentally glacial mood. This is definitely music to conjure up a sinister atmosphere. Howling effects ascend and descend into a wasteland of eerie sounds.

“Ghost With Conscious”, while similar in sounds has a definite industrial slant to it. My only dispute is that maybe it’s a fraction too alike, as one song seemed to end without a new one beginning. That being said, it is a cohesive piece in relation to “Deathbed Memory” with a continuation of menacing sonic journey.

A level of above par production must be mentioned. In a word, it’s flawless. M.Peck’s technical ability is about as close to perfection as a performer can come to. That perfection can lean on the side of coldness, but maybe that was the point of the compositions within themselves. After all how many of our memories are of the warm and fuzzy nature (found on the deathbed or not)? Could the specter without awareness of their thoughts and actions be those around us or our own selves? Maybe M. Peck is asking us for that answer.

Dark Ambient (tm) is a perverse musical enterprise in that, like the horror film, unpalatability becomes a positive attribute, a measure of a work's success. So, if such a work should be described as awful, dreadful, ear-befouling, this may be constructed as a note of positive appraisal, albeit not necessarily of warm embrace. If you're looking for (hubble-bubble toil and) trouble, you've come to the right place. Yes, if it's Dark you're looking for, Dysmha has it. In spades.

Definitely not one for those of delicate ambient sensibilities, Dysmha creeps malevolently into the "doombient" bag with the emphasis on the doom- rather than the (am)bient. DQ (Doom Quotient) is cranked down past the fuzz/buzz-point where you'd locate Fear Falls Burning, and past the gruzz/scuzz-point of Nadja, rendered namby-pambient by comparison. Nearest spirit-kin for these diseased slabs of creeping audio-efflatus would be in the sludge dungeons of Sunn O))). Walls of corrosive guitar, theremin and audio-scum are stirred together into a foul brew of purulent atmospheres of oppressive expressivity. That's opener, "Deathbed Memory." An excoriating pitch black exercise of asphyxiating dense guitar sludge dredged up from some Stygian depths, all toxic brimstone and bitter treacle, is its companion piece "Ghost with No Conscious," a harbinger of no less nihilist doom-gloom.

Now Michael Peck, previously known for a rather elegant strain of glacial ambient-electronica, has no previous form for such dystopian tracts. But he certainly reinvents himself convincingly here as documenter of dystopia. These great belches of withering steel-scuzz are not spewed up from Peck's processor out of the sheer bloody-mindedness of experimenting with a different look. He's not Being Dark, just for the sake of it. It's an aesthetic choice, a deliberate change of voice for articulation of a howl of protest. A searing blast of pent up frustration against a toxic Republican regime, finally let out after years of suppressed revolt. Released the day Bush left office (January 20th, 2009), the punning title plays on the phonetico-semantics of 'dismal'/'dismay,' with a downcast eye to the world's future and the US's deleterious role as steersman charting a course for oblivion. A work in which the bilious vapours of its sounds - the very air coming off it as it leaks thickly from speakers besmirched by its scabrous delivery - seem to crawl with nightmare effluvia. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Session Expiration Warning

Session Expiration

We need to talk.

The web browser you're using to surf the web is so old it’s embarrassing. But hey, we hope you consider us a friend, the kind of friend you can count on to tell you when there's spinach stuck between your teeth. So here it goes: every time you surf the web with that antiquated web browser it’s like you have spinach in your teeth. Every time you get online, spinach!

Look, we don't want you to be the butt of any more jokes when the sites you visit don't load or function properly. So please - for your own sake - click on one of the links for your preferred browser below, and get that spinach out of your teeth for good.